4-Star Stocks Poised to Pop: GT Solar

Based on the aggregated intelligence of 170,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS, the Fool's free investing community, solar equipment manufacturer GT Solar International (Nasdaq: SOLR  ) has earned a respected four-star ranking.

With that in mind, let's take a closer look at GT Solar's business and see what CAPS investors are saying about the stock right now.

GT Solar facts

Headquarters (Founded)	Merrimack, N.H. (1994)
Market Cap	$2.15 billion
Industry	Semiconductor equipment
Trailing-12-Month Revenue	$899 million
Management	CEO Thomas Gutierrez (since 2009) CFO Richard Gaynor (since 2010)
Return on Capital (Average, Past 3 Years)	80.5%
Cash/Debt	$362.7 million / $120.3 million
Competitors	Amtech Systems (Nasdaq: ASYS  ) Applied Materials (Nasdaq: AMAT  ) MEMC Electronic Materials (NYSE: WFR  )

Sources: Capital IQ (a division of Standard & Poor's) and Motley Fool CAPS.

On CAPS, 94% of the 596 members who have rated GT Solar believe the stock will outperform the S&P 500 going forward. These bulls include jpacheco14 and BillStacker.

A couple of months ago, jpacheco14 listed several of GT Solar's positives: "Large and growing backlog for the upcoming years, operates in the ever expanding markets of Asia, outstanding ROE, customers include companies with a very large market share in the field."

GT Solar even boasts a robust three-year average operating margin of 28%. That's much higher than that of competitors like Amtech (8.1%), Applied Materials (12.5%), and MEMC (11.4%).

CAPS member BillStacker elaborates on the GT Solar bull case:

Predicting more big orders on those sapphire furnaces coming soon. LEDs save energy and as the planet's demand for energy increases, the demand for LED will increase too. But so will the demand for solar! SOLR's solar biz is going to turn into the icing going forward though. As more players (like TSM) decide to get in the LED business, who is going to be supplying their manufacturing equipment? GT Advanced Technologies are establishing themselves as leaders here.

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